A federal jury held a defense contractor legally responsible for contributing to the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib for the first time on Tuesday.

The jury awarded a total of $42 million to three Iraqi men — a journalist, a middle school principal, and fruit vendor — who were held at the notorious prison two decades ago. The plaintiffs’ suit accused Virginia-based CACI, which was hired by the U.S. government to provide interrogation services at Abu Ghraib, of conspiring with American soldiers to torture detainees. 

Tuesday’s verdict marks a rare victory for plaintiffs seeking to bring American corporations to justice for playing a part in the country’s so-called war on terror. 

“What the jury did today is send a very clear message that the contractors who go to war or go work with the government overseas, they will be held accountable for their role in whatever violations their employees may commit,” said Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented the plaintiffs, at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon. “They need to have far better oversight over their employees to ensure that something like what happened at Abu Ghraib never happens again.”

The case hinged largely on the legal definition of conspiracy, which doesn’t require an overt act but can also include cooperation with others engaging in torture, said Stjepan Meštrović, a sociology professor at Texas A&M University and expert witness in multiple courts-martial of soldiers who served at Abu Ghraib. “This ruling opens the door to future findings of responsibility based upon conspiracy to commit war crimes by civilian contractors and other adjuncts to military forces,” he said in an emailed statement. 

CACI had argued that while abuses did occur at Abu Ghraib, it was ultimately the Army who was responsible for this conduct, even if CACI employees may have been involved. The defense contractor also argued there was no definitive evidence that their staff abused the three Iraqi men who filed the case — and that it could have been American soldiers who tortured them. The jury did not find that argument persuasive.

A lawyer for CACI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The monetary compensation for plaintiffs includes $3 million each for compensatory damages and $11 million each for punitive damages. Their lawyers say that’s what they requested. Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said in a press conference on Tuesday that the verdict “sends a strong message that this kind of corporate malfeasance and neglect and recklessness and deflection is outrageous and deserves to be punished.”

The case was filed 16 years ago but got caught up in procedural hurdles, as CACI tried more than 20 times to dismiss the lawsuit. November’s case was a retrial; in an initial trial in April, jurors were deadlocked following more than a week of deliberations. The judge declared a mistrial. That trial, earlier this year, also marked the first time that an American jury heard directly from Iraqis who were detained at Abu Ghraib.

The lawsuit was first brought in 2008 under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows noncitizens to bring cases involving clear violations of international law, such as torture, to an American federal court when there’s a substantial connection to the U.S. “It was the United States that invaded Iraq, it was the United States that detained our clients, and it was a US company that profited from their torture and abuse,” Gallagher said in Tuesday’s press conference. 

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That Al Shimari v. CACI survived so many procedural hurdles is impressive, notes Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford University, in an emailed statement. In recent years, the Supreme Court has made it harder for cases involving national security concerns to get a trial. “It’s exceedingly rare for torture survivors or other human rights victims of the U.S. global war on terror to prevail in U.S. courts, whether against government officials or military contractors,” Sinnar wrote. “The Supreme Court has made it incredibly difficult to hold the national security state accountable in court. So this victory is exceptional in every sense of the term.”

It’s also notable that an American jury sided with the Iraqi men against an American military contractor, says Yumna Rizvi, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Victims of Torture, an international nonprofit. “It shows that they’re clearly not in lockstep with the decisions of their government,” Rizvi said. “The American public is putting its government and its contractors on notice that, ‘We see you and we don’t agree with what you’ve done or are doing.’”

Rizvi wonders about the precedent that could have been set for other cases if plaintiffs had been able to go to trial earlier. “You can’t just go around destroying people’s bodies and spirits and minds and just walk away from it,” she said. “Unfortunately, that’s what we’ve seen for too long in the U.S. war on terror and how the U.S. has behaved around the world.”

The plaintiffs — Suhail Najim Abdullah Al Shimari, Salah Hasan Nusaif Al-Ejaili, and Asa’ad Hamza Hanfoosh Zuba’e — had testified about facing sexual abuse and harassment, as well as being beaten and threatened with dogs at Abu Ghraib in the early 2000s. “My body was like a machine, responding to all external orders,” Al-Ejaili, a former journalist with Al Jazeera, had previously said. “The only part I owned was my brain, which could not be stopped by the black plastic bag they used to cover my head.”

Al-Ejaili flew to the U.S. to be present for both trials, but he first heard the jury’s verdict while he was at home with his family in Sweden. On Tuesday, he was expecting a call from Azmy notifying him about the jury’s decision. When his phone rang, Azmy’s first words were: “Salah, we won.” 

“It was pure, profound joy,” Al-Ejaili said.

The post Abu Ghraib Detainees Awarded $42 Million in Torture Trial Against U.S. Defense Contractor appeared first on The Intercept.

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While president-elect Donald Trump accuses the U.S. military of being too “woke,” a morale patch showcased on a Defense Department website suggests some troops are as bigoted as ever. While the military has covered up evidence of the patch, removing photographs of it amid press outcry, the Pentagon has not disavowed it.

In late October, the website of the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service — the Pentagon’s official photo repository — posted a photograph highlighting the shoulder patch of Lt. Kyle Festa, a pilot assigned to the Navy’s Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron 74. 

Festa’s patch features crosshairs over likenesses of the Tusken Raiders, the fictional “sand people” who attacked Luke Skywalker in the 1977 movie “Star Wars.” The patch reads: “Houthi Hunting Club. Red Sea 2023-2024.”

The insignia commemorated his deployment aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Red Sea, according to the photo’s caption. Since January, U.S. warships in the Red Sea have repeatedly struck the Houthis, a nationalist movement that controls much of Yemen and has been attacking ships — including U.S. warships — there and in the Gulf of Aden in retaliation for the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Gaza.

U.S. military personnel wear all manner of patches — official and unofficial — on their uniforms. Some so-called morale patches are rooted in heraldry and history; others reference pop culture or dark humor.

“The patches reduce the Houthis to the status of a not-quite-human, semi-alien Other. So the enemy is given quasi-racialized and subhuman status, which makes it easier to kill them,” observes Janet McIntosh, a professor of anthropology at Brandeis University and an expert in the U.S. military’s long history of dehumanizing its enemies. “It also lumps all Houthis into the same category, which will also make non-combatants or civilians easier to kill.”

For years, the United States backed an atrocity-filled air campaign led by Saudi Arabia against the Houthis. Just after entering office, President Joe Biden formally delisted Houthis as terrorist group. But after the Houthis started targeting ships, Biden reclassified them as a terrorists and began launching attacks on Houthi missile and radar sites.

“For over a year, the Iran-backed Houthis, Specially Designated Global Terrorists, have recklessly and unlawfully attacked U.S. and international vessels transiting the Red Sea, the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait, and the Gulf of Aden,” said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last month, announcing airstrikes in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen by Air Force B-2 bombers, a rarely used stealth plane capable of carrying the U.S. military’s largest “bunker buster” bombs.

The Intercept asked the Office of the Secretary of Defense whether Austin agrees with the morale patch’s characterization of the Houthis but did not receive a reply prior to publication. “The patch signifies the squadron’s operational achievements and heritage,” according to the caption of the official Navy photograph by Austen McClain. 

After several journalists — including former Intercept reporter Ken Klippenstein — drew attention to the “Houthi Hunting Club” photograph, that image and another of Festa wearing the patch, were removed from the Defense Department website. “After further review, it was determined that the patch was inappropriate in nature and not consistent with uniform regulations,” Cmdr. Dawn M. Stankus, a public affairs officer for Naval Air Force Atlantic, told The Intercept. She and other Navy spokespeople failed to respond to more substantive questions about the decision.

Dehumanization is a conduit to killing. The use of animalistic slurs has been shown to increase people’s willingness to endorse harming a target group. The Nazis, for example, compared Jews to rats. During the Rwandan genocide, Hutu officials referred to Tutsis as “cockroaches.”

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White Americans have been dehumanizing racial and ethnic Others since long before there was a United States. Racist dehumanization was central to the justification of European conquest, settler colonialism, and chattel slavery, making it inextricable from the nation’s origins. No less a document than the U.S. Declaration of Independence of 1776 refers to “merciless Indian savages.” Recent studies have shown, almost 250 years later, racist attitudes by Americans toward minority groups persist.

Research led by Nour Kteily, a social psychologist at Northwestern University, asked participants to rate where they think various groups belong on a 100-point scale of “evolutionary progress,” mapped onto the drawing of the “Ascent of Man” showing ape-like human ancestors on the left and a fully upright humans on the right. They found “Americans rate Americans, Europeans, Japanese. and Australians equivalently high on the scale (i.e., 90 to 93) but rate Mexican immigrants, Arabs, and Muslims 10 to 15 points lower,” according to their 2017 study. A quarter of Americans, in fact, rated Muslims at or below 60 on the scale.

The U.S. military also has a long history of dehumanizing its enemies — especially racial Others — from the Indian Wars of the 18th and 19th centuries onward. During America’s war in the Philippines, at the turn of the 20th century, U.S. troops began calling their Indigenous enemies “goo-goos.” The pejorative term then seems to have transmuted into “gook” and was applied over the decades to enemies during the so-called banana wars in Haiti and Nicaragua prior to World War II, and after that conflict in Korea during the 1950s.

The epithet returned to the lips of U.S. troops in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. While other slurs were freely employed, “gook” was — from the beginning of the conflict to its end — uttered ad infinitum. “The colonels called them gooks, the captain called them gooks, the staff all called them gooks. They were dinks, you know, subhuman,” recalled one veteran in an interview in the 1970s, published in Robert J. Lifton’s “Home From the War.”

The notion that the Vietnamese were something less than human was often spoken of as the “mere-gook rule,” or MGR. This held that all Vietnamese — northern and southern, adults and children, armed enemy and innocent civilian — were little more than animals, who could be killed or abused at will. The MGR mentality excused all manner of atrocities and encouraged troops to kill without compunction. “Shouldn’t bother you at all, just some more dead gooks. The sooner they all die, the sooner we go back to the World,” a Marine recounted, in a memoir published by Naval Institute Press, being told at the time. The slur and the mindset encouraged callous killing during a conflict in which an estimated 2 million Vietnamese civilians were slain, around 5.3 million were wounded (using a conservative estimate), and 11 million were displaced by the war.

During the war on terror, a passel of new slurs came into use, with “sand nigger” among the most vile. “The infantry taught us to use language like ‘haji’ and ‘raghead’ and ‘target’ and ‘towelhead’ to dehumanize not just enemy combatants, but every Iraqi or Arab person we encountered,” recalled one post-9/11 Marine Corps veteran. “Our senior Marines joked about raping Iraqi women, so we did too. They called Iraqi children terrorists in training, and meant it. So we did too.”

The U.S. military is not unaware of its propensities. In a 2013 article in Military Review, three Army lieutenant colonels (two on active duty and one retired) wrote:

For the soldier at war, objectifying oneself as superior and the ‘other’ as inferior can rapidly transform even minor abuses into very serious crimes. … Leaders often condone this self-deception because they believe they are helping themselves and their troops to do what “must be done.” Unfortunately, while attempts at dehumanizing the enemy may make killing easier for some (at least in the short term), these attempts can be the first steps on the road toward atrocities — acts that cannot occur without such dehumanization.

For years, the military has been excoriated by right-wing pundits for being too “woke.” The foreword to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s nearly 900-page blueprint for a second Trump term, laments that “woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon force troops to attend ‘training’ seminars about ‘white privilege.’” The Houthi Hunting Club patch suggests that such sessions may have had limited effect.

“The military’s tacit endorsement of the patches is part of a broader pattern of conflicted messaging in military training and military culture,” said McIntosh, who addresses this tension in her forthcoming book, “Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics.” “On the one hand, one is instructed about rules and laws designed to carefully control violence, but on the other, you can find messaging that indirectly encourages the idea that military identity is partly about transgressing morality and sometimes even the military’s own rules.”

In many cases, morale patches are not officially sanctioned but are tolerated within the military to foster esprit de corps. In 2021, the Air Force ordered a review of official and unofficial unit emblems, morale patches, mottos, nicknames, and challenge coins to weed out those that were racist, sexist or otherwise offensive. “Our core values demand we hold ourselves to high standards and maintain a culture of respect and trust in our chain of command,” read the memorandum announcing the review. That same year, the 51st Civil Engineer Squadron “Mongrels” in Osan, South Korea, replaced its pit bull morale patch because it too closely resembled an image of a pit bull that the Anti-Defamation League had labeled a white supremacist symbol.

While the photographs of Festa and his Houthi Hunting Club patch were removed, the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service website continues to display photos of other patches such as a 2022 women’s leadership patch with the “imagery of a woman standing proudly against the force of an atomic explosion.” Another patch features the likeness of Nusret Gökçe — a celebrity chef better known as Salt Bae for his ridiculous way of sprinkling salt on steaks — dropping Joint Direct Attack Munitions in a similar manner.

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The Houthi Hunting Club patch is available through a commercial website that stresses that while it is not affiliated with the U.S military, it is nonetheless “where most [U.S. Marine Corps] and Navy squadrons direct purchase their squadron patches,” adding that they “are licensed by the USMC and US Navy Trademark Offices.” (It is not clear if Festa’s patch was purchased from the website.)

McIntosh noted that unlike the use of slurs as a means of dehumanization during the Vietnam War, the Houthi Hunting Club patch uses images of fictional movie characters, offering plausible deniability — a means to cast the patch as a joke. She calls this an example of “frame perversion,” the commingling of upbeat and menacing symbolism within military culture. “The Houthi Hunting patches both invoke the sport of hunting — where people kill for fun — and entertainment by picturing the sand people, who have pop cultural resonance. This general kind of layering of the semiotics of fun onto military killing is really common,” she says, noting that it is both a gallows-humor coping mechanism and a license for violence and military depravity.

The contradictions surrounding the patch are legion, not the least of which being the failures of the U.S. military effort against the Houthis. The USS Eisenhower Strike Group alone conducted more than “750 engagements,” utilizing “792 munitions in combat,” according to a July Navy press release. Just a month earlier, however, a report from the Defense Intelligence Agency acknowledged that Houthi attacks had led to a 90 percent decline in shipping activity through the Red Sea.

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Since November 2023, the Houthis have carried out almost 100 attacks on ships, sinking two vessels and seizing another. They have even targeted U.S. Navy ships, leaving sailors unaccustomed to enemy attack distressed. “It was incredibly different,” said Cmdr. Benjamin Orloff, a Navy pilot. “And I’ll be honest, it was a little traumatizing for the group. It’s something that we don’t think about a lot until you’re presented with it.”

The Pentagon failed to respond to questions about its military efforts against the Houthis and whether it views the military campaign as a success. It also failed to comment on the decision to remove photographs of the Houthi Hunting Club patch, nor whether any action would be taken to restrict its wear by military personnel.

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RTX Corporation, the weapons giant formerly (and better) known as Raytheon, agreed on Wednesday to pay almost $1 billion to resolve allegations that it defrauded the U.S. government and paid bribes to secure business with Qatar.

“Raytheon engaged in criminal schemes to defraud the U.S. government,” said Deputy Assistant Attorney General Kevin Driscoll of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division on Wednesday. “Such corrupt and fraudulent conduct, especially by a publicly traded U.S. defense contractor, erodes public trust and harms the DOD, businesses that play by the rules, and American taxpayers.”

RTX, as part of this agreement that spanned multiple investigations into its business, admitted to engaging in two separate schemes to defraud the Defense Department, which included deals for a radar system and Patriot missile systems. It also agreed to enter a separate deferred prosecution agreement, which requires increased government oversight and transparency for the next three years, in connection with the Qatari kickbacks.

“Over the course of several years, Raytheon employees bribed a high-level Qatari military official to obtain lucrative defense contracts and concealed the bribe payments by falsifying documents to the government, in violation of laws including those designed to protect our national security,” said Breon Peace, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “We will continue to pursue justice against corruption, and as this agreement establishes, enforce meaningful consequences, reforms and monitorship to ensure this misconduct is not repeated.”

The $950 million payment includes criminal penalties, civil fines, restitution, and the return of profits that RTX made by bilking the Pentagon.

The announcement is a rare example of a major defense company being held accountable for its white-collar crimes. But while defrauding the government and breaking international corruption laws, Raytheon has also been party to potential war crimes in recent years.

One of the largest military contractors on Earth, Raytheon makes missiles, bombs, components for fighter jets and many other weapon systems used in war zones from Afghanistan and Iraq to Gaza and Yemen. Civilians have frequently paid the price.

“Not only does Raytheon rip off the government on a regular basis, but its weapons have been used to kill civilians in Yemen, Gaza, and other war zones,” William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and longtime weapons industry watcher, told The Intercept.

RTX spokesperson Chris Johnson said the company was taking responsibility for its wrongdoing in the fraud and bribery scandal. “We have worked diligently during the investigations to remediate that misconduct and continue to do so,” he told The Intercept but declined to comment on civilian casualties caused by Raytheon’s weapons.

Prior to 2023, the Israeli military used Raytheon’s 5,000-pound GBU-28 “bunker buster” and laser-guided Paveway bombs, as well as AGM-65 Maverick air-to-ground missiles, AIM-9X missiles, AIM-120 Sidewinder missiles, and TOW long-range missiles to attack targets in Gaza, according to a 2022 report by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization. 

Such weapons are typically launched or dropped from F-15, F-16, and F-35 fighter jets for which Raytheon provides weapon systems, components, and maintenance services. The Israeli military has possibly used its “bunker buster” bombs — weapons prohibited for use in areas with large civilian populations — in Gaza during the current war as well.

The Saudi-led coalition’s war in Yemen was also waged using Raytheon munitions. In 2022, the coalition conducted an airstrike on a detention center that, according to Doctors Without Borders, killed at least 80 people and injured more than 200. An investigation by Amnesty International found a Raytheon-made GBU-12, a 500-pound laser-guided bomb, was used in the attack. Amnesty also found that Raytheon bombs were used in a 2019 Saudi-led airstrike that killed six civilians — including three children.

An investigation by CNN and Yemen-based human rights group Mwatana found evidence that Raytheon weapons systems were used by the Saudi-led coalition in numerous instances of civilian harm, such as a 2018 attack on a wedding party that killed 21 civilians, including 11 children, and injured another 97 people, 48 of them children; a 2016 airstrike that killed 15 members of a single family including 12 children, the youngest a 1-year-old boy; the 2016 bombing of an apartment that killed six; and a 2015 strike on a residential neighborhood that killed one civilian and wounded six others, including two women and a young girl.

“The Raytheon allegations are stunning, even by the lax standards of the arms industry,” Hartung told The Intercept this week. “Engaging in illegal conduct on this scale suggests that, far from being an aberration, this behavior may be business as usual for the company.” 

While Raytheon has been a key U.S. defense contractor since the 1940s, cashing in on tens of billions of dollars in government contracts, the company has, indeed, been embroiled in scandals and malfeasance for decades, though it has rarely been compelled to pay fines and penalties of this magnitude.

The company pleaded guilty to “illegally trafficking in secret military budget reports” (1990); paid $4 million to settle charges that it overbilled the Pentagon (1994); paid $10 million to settle a class-action lawsuit contending that its Amana unit sold defective furnaces and water heaters (1997); paid $2.7 million to settle allegations that it improperly charged the Pentagon for expenses incurred in marketing products to foreign governments (1998); paid $400,000 to settle claims that it overcharged the Defense Department (1999); paid the federal government more than $1 million to resolve quality-control issues on various electronic devices sold to the Pentagon (2000); paid $3.9 million to settle charges that it overbilled the Defense Department (2003); agreed to pay a $25 million civil penalty to resolve State Department charges that the company violated export controls (2003); agreed to pay $12 million after the SEC found it made “false and misleading disclosures and used improper accounting practices that operated as a fraud” (2006); agreed to pay an $8 million fine for export control violations (2013); agreed to pay $1 million to settle a claim involving procurement fraud (2019); agreed, along with a subsidiary, to pay $515,000 to settle False Claims Act allegations (2021); and agreed to pay $59.2 million to settle an Employee Retirement Income Security Act complaint after using an outdated mortality table to improperly calculate retirement benefits (2021).

Earlier this year, RTX agreed to pay $200 million to settle allegations that it violated U.S. export controls, including by transferring some technology behind Air Force One and U.S. military aircraft to China, among other wrongdoing, and was named in a class-action lawsuit for allegedly discriminating against job-seekers who are 40 years or older. This week’s $950 million agreement includes a $428 million civil settlement for allegedly deceiving the government about its labor and material costs to justify pricier no-bid contracts and for double-billing on a weapons maintenance contract.

“Raytheon Corporation engaged in a systematic and deliberate conspiracy that knowingly and willfully violated U.S. fraud and export laws,” said Special Agent in Charge William S. Walker of Homeland Security Investigations, New York earlier this week. “Raytheon’s bribery of government officials, specifically those involved in the procurement of U.S. military technology, posed a national security threat to both the United States and its allies.”

Johnson, the RTX spokesperson, would not comment on Raytheon’s long history of alleged misconduct, noting only that “RTX has entered into agreements with the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) and the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) related to previously disclosed investigations,” characterizing them as “legacy legal matters.” He also failed to respond to questions about the company endangering U.S. national security and its obligation to the U.S. taxpayers.

While taxpayers have been harmed by Raytheon’s corrupt business practices, the weapons giant’s investors have cashed in during Israel’s war on Gaza. “Raytheon’s total return for investors in the past year is 82.69 percent, outperforming the S&P 500 by about 46 percent,” Eli Clifton, a senior adviser at the Quincy Institute, wrote recently.

“At this point Raytheon appears to be a rogue company that is more interested in increasing revenues for its executives and shareholders than serving as a reliable supplier of defense equipment,” Hartung told The Intercept. “The scale of Raytheon’s malfeasance suggests that the Justice Department should take a close look at the practices of other arms contractors to determine whether the kinds of things Raytheon has done are an industry-wide practice.”

The post When Blood Money Isn’t Enough: Raytheon Admits to Defrauding Pentagon appeared first on The Intercept.

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Two decades ago, Shahawar Matin Siraj started to feel uneasy about a plan to bomb a subway station in Manhattan. Osama Eldawoody, a New York City Police Department informant recruited after 9/11, had established himself as a father figure to Siraj, who was 21 when they met. Eldawoody was almost twice his age. He had shown Siraj graphic visuals of Muslims being tortured and told him that suicide bombings were forbidden but “killing the killers” was not.

Siraj eventually introduced Eldawoody to a friend, James Elshafay, who was 19 at the time. Elshafay started suggesting actual targets, such as bridges and police precincts. Siraj offered an alternative: the Herald Square subway station. Eldawoody told Siraj that the “Brotherhood” wanted to support his plan. 

But as it started to feel real, Siraj tried to back out — insisting about 18 times that he was not willing to place bombs in the station. “I have to, you know, ask my mom’s permission,” he had said — suggesting that the most he would be comfortable with would be acting as a lookout. Siraj and Elshafay were arrested a week later.

Elshafay pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison and three of supervised release. Siraj decided to fight the charges, went to trial, and was sentenced in 2007 to 30 years in prison after three years of pretrial detention. 

Now, after serving more than 75 percent of his sentence, he and his lawyers at CLEAR, a legal nonprofit and clinic at the City University of New York, are fighting for his compassionate release.

Opening arguments took place on Wednesday before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in Manhattan, where Siraj’s legal team is appealing a March 2023 decision from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York denying that request. Siraj’s lawyer, Mudassar Hayat Toppa, a staff attorney at CLEAR, argued that he deserves compassionate release for many reasons, especially his youth and vulnerability at the time. A forensic psychologist, arranged by the defense to evaluate Siraj for sentencing, had previously said that he had impaired critical thinking and analytical skills. “Based on his intellectual limitations … he is susceptible to the manipulations and demands of others,” the expert noted. Even Siraj’s family described a somewhat childlike demeanor; his sister mentioned that before his arrest he would watch cartoons and play video games, particularly Pokémon, everyday. 

The defense also pointed on Wednesday to Siraj’s efforts at rehabilitation, including how he put his own safety at risk to protect a federal corrections official from an act of violence from another inmate. They emphasized the significantly shorter sentence given to his co-defendant; difficult prison conditions, including four years at the Communications Management Unit at FCI-Terre Haute; and the discriminatory police surveillance that led law enforcement to him. Rather than considering these reasons holistically, the district court denied his motion by evaluating each one in isolation, they argued. The prosecution refuted this argument on Wednesday, with lawyer Nina Gupta saying that the government did not view each reason in isolation. In a legal brief, they cited a map that Siraj had drawn of the subway station and that he failed to meet the heavy burden of proof showing that the district court “made a clearly erroneous assessment of the evidence.”

Siraj is one of almost 1,000 terrorism defendants prosecuted by the U.S. since 9/11, according to an Intercept database that was last updated in June 2023; more than 350 defendants’ cases involved FBI stings with an informant or undercover agent. The fear of this kind of surveillance transformed the social fabric of Muslim communities and made them more insular. 

“You didn’t know if the person you’re talking to was an informant or undercover,” says Fahd Ahmed, executive director of Desis Rising Up and Moving, or DRUM, which represents low-wage South Asian and Indo-Caribbean immigrants, workers, and youth in New York City. (Siraj’s family are members.) A 2014 Human Rights Watch report closely reviewed 27 federal prosecutions involving 77 defendants and found that in some instances, “the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action or encouraging the target to act.” The report also described a pattern of targeting people with mental or intellectual disabilities in these stings. 

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Siraj’s counsel — like many others — had tried and failed in proving their earlier assertions of entrapment in court. Despite reports documenting the invasive role of law enforcement in encouraging crime, winning a legal case using an entrapment defense is essentially “impossible,” says Kathy Manley, legal director for Coalition for Civil Freedoms, a nonprofit organization that advocates for people they believe have been targeted in terrorism cases as part of the broader “war on terror.” Manley explains that’s because prosecutors just need to find that an individual is predisposed to commit a crime in order to rule out entrapment. They can do that by showing that the defendant failed to remove themselves from the situation or by pointing to political statements, Manley says. In Siraj’s case, the prosecutors considered his empathy for Palestinian suicide bombers living under occupation and his fascination with Osama bin Laden. 

In asking for compassionate release, CLEAR is not attempting to relitigate the court’s verdict on entrapment. The lawyers tried on Wednesday to clarify a letter written by Siraj that they say the district court “erroneously interpreted.” The defendant had written in a letter to the court, “I knew I would never have been involved in any terrorist plot had I never met the informant, but I also knew I had made some terrible mistakes.” The district court concluded that “such an assertion is not an acceptance of responsibility, but an attempt to shift blame for extraordinarily serious conduct and to relitigate the underlying facts of his case” — and in particular, “the jury’s rejection of his entrapment defense.”

This reasoning was used to reject arguments highlighting Siraj’s rehabilitation, age, and unique vulnerabilities, since the district court perceived this “unwillingness to accept responsibility” as evidence that Siraj is not sufficiently remorseful, after 17 years in prison, for his actions. CLEAR highlighted several other explicit admissions of responsibility and remorse for his role in the conspiracy. “I also know that I am ultimately responsible for my actions and the consequences that resulted from them,” Siraj had written.

Compassionate release has been granted in similar cases before, albeit rarely. Last July, a U.S. district judge ordered the release of three men convicted in a terrorism sting, saying that “the real lead conspirator was the United States.” Three men from the “Newburgh Four” were freed after the judge found that they were little more than “petty criminals” and that FBI agents had been the major driver of a supposed plot to blow up synagogues in New York and shoot down official planes.

After Wednesday’s trial, Siraj’s lawyer said that evidence of his client’s rehabilitation is among the most compelling he’s seen in compassionate release cases. “This case is important not just for Siraj,” Toppa said, “but also for others serving long sentences on terrorism-related convictions, whose redeeming conduct and statements during their incarceration are scrutinized to an unreasonable degree and dismissed by courts seemingly because of the nature of their offense.”

As Siraj waits for the court’s verdict, he has now spent 20 of his 42 years behind bars. His family is shattered too. After Siraj’s arrest in 2004, community members, including some relatives, pulled away and avoided visiting their home or saying hello on the street, says Ahmed, the director of DRUM. That’s a common dynamic with families whose loved ones have been charged with terrorism in cases involving informants. “They’re worried about getting painted as terrorism sympathizers,” Ahmed says. As for Siraj’s mother, Ahmed says she rarely leaves her home because she doesn’t want to miss a phone call from him.

The post An Informant Pushed Him to Plot a Subway Bombing. After 20 Years Behind Bars, He Has a Chance at Freedom. appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

During the fall of 2022, Western support for defending Ukraine was achieving results that few had thought possible. A successful Ukrainian counteroffensive had pushed Russia out of Kharkiv, and it was on the verge of being forced out of Kherson too.

The successes were so rousing that President Joe Biden began worry about Russia getting desperate and the potential risk of a nuclear escalation. In private remarks at a fundraiser, Biden reportedly said that the risk of nuclear “armageddon” was the highest it had been since the Cuban missile crisis.

After news of the comments broke, 30 progressive Democrats issued a letter echoing Biden’s concerns and urging the administration to pair support for Ukraine’s successes with a “proactive diplomatic push” to seek a ceasefire. The signatories were unequivocal that they supported Biden’s commitment to Ukraine. A draft of the letter had even come in for criticism from the grassroots supports of diplomacy for its staunch support of sending billions in arms to Ukraine.

It all seemed very reasonable, especially amid talk of nuclear war.

The lawmakers were torn to shreds.

The mild-mannered letter from the Congressional Progressive Caucus provoked wild political attacks, recriminations, and resignations. Factions of progressives, liberals, and Democrats feuded on Twitter. Headlines and talk shows took up the issue. The anti-diplomacy voices won the day: The letter would eventually be retracted, with its supporters taking a huge political hit.

Related

House Progressives Float Diplomatic Path Toward Ending War in Ukraine, Get Annihilated, Quickly “Clarify”

Today, however, the war is stuck. The momentum has shifted. And tens of thousands more Ukrainians and Russians have lost their lives. And even members of the foreign policy establishment are coming to realize it.

“I think it’s safe to say that Ukraine is unable to generate the combat capability needed to achieve military victory, and right now the momentum on the battlefield, despite Ukraine’s push into the Kursk region of Russia, favors Russia,” said Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and international affairs professor at Georgetown University. “Because of that reality, I think that the Ukrainians themselves and Ukraine’s supporters in the West need to have truthful, even if painful, conversations about how to end this war sooner rather than later.”

In 2022, the progressives had been pilloried and cowed. Today, they look more prescient than ever.

The Backlash

At the time of its release, the CPC’s letter provoked a furious backlash. Washington’s foreign policy establishment, and even members of the progressives’ own party, melted down.

Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., went as far as to accuse his fellow House Democrats of offering an “olive branch to a war criminal who’s losing his war.”

Brandon Friedman, a former Obama administration official, said that progressives had just given “Republicans, the Kremlin and Russian propaganda networks an absolute gift with this letter.”

Joe Cirincione, a Washington national security analyst and figure in the progressive foreign policy world, called the letter an “incoherent mishmash of contradictory positions based on an outdated analysis of the war.”

“It was written when the war was stalemated, released when Ukraine is winning,” said Cirincione, who resigned from the Quincy Institute over the think tank’s call for diplomatic talks. “Of course the positions don’t make sense.”

Within 24 hours, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., the caucus chair, withdrew the letter and issued a “clarification statement.” Other signatories acted like they were walking the letter back, though they were merely reiterating the unequivocal support for Ukraine’s defense that the letter itself had made clear. (Many of the lawmakers involved did not respond to my requests for comment.)

In a nearly 900-word statement, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., blamed “unfortunate timing” and doubled down on the idea that the U.S. should help Ukraine fight until the end. “All champions of democracy over autocracy — whether they call themselves progressives, conservatives or liberals — should be doing whatever we can to ensure that Ukraine wins this just war as quickly as possible,” he said.

A few voices of reason emerged, as a few members of Congress held fast. Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y, were among the few who publicly defended their call for diplomacy. “History shows that silencing debate in Congress about matters of war and peace never ends well,” Khanna said at the time.

Related

The Disturbing Groupthink Over the War in Ukraine

Even some former Obama officials were shocked by the response. Ben Rhodes criticized the “circular firing squad” against pro-diplomacy advocates on the left, saying there was “nothing objectionable in this letter whatsoever.”

Far from being an “outdated analysis,” as critics like Cirincione claimed, the letter’s strategy of using war successes to get a ceasefire seems today like it was far-sighted.

“Cycle of Persistent Violence”

Since the ill-fated letter, the war has ground on — with devastating results for the people of Ukraine. Ukraine is not in a position to win the war, nor does it have a stronger bargaining position in talks than it did in late 2022 when the CPC letter came out.

A New York Times report in August cited U.S. officials estimating the Ukrainian death toll at close to 70,000, with 100,000 to 120,000 wounded. Ukraine has lost a fifth of its population to migration, and many able-bodied men have been killed, severely injured, or are currently fighting and out of the workforce. CNN reported this week that desertion is a major problem for Ukraine.

Despite the heavy toll, Ukraine lost territory to Russia over the course of 2023, and Russian advances have only gained steam since then.

Former CIA Russia analyst George Beebe said that the conflict has become a war of attrition, so Ukrainians are losing bargaining leverage by the day. “They’re going to need Western help” to strike a compromise settlement with Russia, he said, adding that it would take robust U.S. involvement.

Has it benefited Ukraine to keep fighting? “No, I don’t think so,” Beebe told me. “Actually, Ukraine has lost a lot more people. It is on a path toward becoming a failed state.”

Despite the criticisms, despite many of its members caving, the CPC letter had been on to something. Now, Washington is playing catch-up, with Ukraine bearing the brunt of the lack of U.S. foresight and no one standing to gain as much as empowered Vladimir Putin.

Though the controversy around the CPC letter was almost immediately memory-holed, it would only be a few weeks before it started to look like pro-diplomacy advocates would eventually be vindicated.

A Washington Post report revealed that the Biden administration was privately encouraging Ukraine to show that it’s open to negotiations. Gen. Mark Milley, the since-retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the growing group of people advocating for diplomacy to end the war. Citing the lesson of World War I, where the failure to negotiate led to millions of unnecessary deaths, Milley called on Russia and Ukraine to “seize the moment” and consider peace talks that winter.

For all the purportedly pro-Ukraine motivations behind the meltdown over the ceasefire letter, it is Ukrainians themselves who have most acutely felt the pain of continued war.

Many Ukrainians seem to understand this better than backers in Washington: Ukraine’s government reportedly charged nearly 19,000 soldiers with abandoning their positions in just the first four months of 2024. The same could be said for conscripted Russians forced to serve under Putin’s authoritarian drive to win the war.

“There are no protections for conscientious objectors in Ukraine or in Russia through this war,” said Bridget Moix, the general secretary of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a progressive group that supports diplomacy. “We have to look at how we can support other ways to end this war, other ways to protect civilians, other ways to find a solution out of the violence now. We’re in a cycle of persistent violence that’s costing tremendous lives on both sides.”

Reduced Leverage

Though Ukrainian and American leaders have come to terms with Ukraine’s reduced negotiating leverage, Washington national security elites have not reckoned with the stances they took earlier in the war. After experiencing what former State Department official-turned-commentator Tommy Vietor called a “strangely vicious controversy,” former proponents of diplomacy are now steering clear of the topic.

Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., one of the CPC members who signed the initial 2022 letter, disavowed it in October of that year.

“Timing in diplomacy is everything. I signed this letter on June 30, but a lot has changed since then. I wouldn’t sign it today,” Jacobs wrote on X. “We have to continue supporting Ukraine economically and militarily to give them the leverage they need to end this war.”

Today, asked if Jacobs stands by her decision to withdraw support for the letter, her office replied, “Decisions about if and when to negotiate an end to this war are up to Ukraine. I have and will continue to support Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.”

For some experts, there was a missed opportunity to stand firm behind the letter.

“We always say that it’s for the Ukrainians to decide, but really we make Ukrainian decisions possible by our support.”

“That was the moment to just sort of say, ‘OK, let’s split the baby here, and you’re going to be able to get this, and we’re going to be able to walk away and not have our infrastructure destroyed,’” said Keith Darden, a comparative politics professor at American University and Russia–Ukraine expert. “If you think about the destruction that’s been visited on Ukraine, both just sheer death toll and in the destruction of the power grid and infrastructure since that time, the fall of 2022, it’s just really tragic that there wasn’t more of a push made then.”

The negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow in the early weeks of the Russian invasion — which were held predominantly in Turkey — were another chance to end the war, Darden said. In April 2022, Russia and Ukraine had agreed on the outlines of a tentative agreement to halt the conflict. The U.S. and U.K. governments, however, worked to sabotage the deal and prolong the war, according to multiple reports.

By May 2022, Ukrainska Pravda, a pro-Western Ukrainian outlet, reported that former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that the West would not support a peace deal even if Ukraine was ready to sign one. The West, Johnson said, preferred to fight Putin because he was less powerful than they thought.

“We always say that it’s for the Ukrainians to decide, but really we make Ukrainian decisions possible by our support,” Darden said. “Without our support, Ukrainians wouldn’t be in a position to make decisions — these things would be forced on them by Russian victory.”

The post Progressives Were Pilloried for Wanting to End the Ukraine War in 2022. Things Have Only Gotten Worse. appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

During the fall of 2022, Western support for defending Ukraine was achieving results that few had thought possible. A successful Ukrainian counteroffensive had pushed Russia out of Kharkiv, and it was on the verge of being forced out of Kherson too.

The successes were so rousing that President Joe Biden began to worry about Russia getting desperate and the potential risk of a nuclear escalation. In private remarks at a fundraiser, Biden reportedly said that the risk of nuclear “armageddon” was the highest it had been since the Cuban missile crisis.

After news of the comments broke, 30 progressive Democrats issued a letter echoing Biden’s concerns and urging the administration to pair support for Ukraine’s successes with a “proactive diplomatic push” to seek a ceasefire. The signatories were unequivocal that they supported Biden’s commitment to Ukraine. A draft of the letter had even come in for criticism from the grassroots supports of diplomacy for its staunch support of sending billions in arms to Ukraine.

It all seemed very reasonable, especially amid talk of nuclear war.

The lawmakers were torn to shreds.

The mild-mannered letter from the Congressional Progressive Caucus provoked wild political attacks, recriminations, and resignations. Factions of progressives, liberals, and Democrats feuded on Twitter. Headlines and talk shows took up the issue. The anti-diplomacy voices won the day: The letter would eventually be retracted, with its supporters taking a huge political hit.

Related

House Progressives Float Diplomatic Path Toward Ending War in Ukraine, Get Annihilated, Quickly “Clarify”

Today, however, the war is stuck. The momentum has shifted. And tens of thousands more Ukrainians and Russians have lost their lives. And even members of the foreign policy establishment are coming to realize it.

“I think it’s safe to say that Ukraine is unable to generate the combat capability needed to achieve military victory, and right now the momentum on the battlefield, despite Ukraine’s push into the Kursk region of Russia, favors Russia,” said Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and international affairs professor at Georgetown University. “Because of that reality, I think that the Ukrainians themselves and Ukraine’s supporters in the West need to have truthful, even if painful, conversations about how to end this war sooner rather than later.”

In 2022, the progressives had been pilloried and cowed. Today, they look more prescient than ever.

The Backlash

At the time of its release, the CPC’s letter provoked a furious backlash. Washington’s foreign policy establishment, and even members of the progressives’ own party, melted down.

Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., went as far as to accuse his fellow House Democrats of offering an “olive branch to a war criminal who’s losing his war.”

Brandon Friedman, a former Obama administration official, said that progressives had just given “Republicans, the Kremlin and Russian propaganda networks an absolute gift with this letter.”

Joe Cirincione, a Washington national security analyst and figure in the progressive foreign policy world, called the letter an “incoherent mishmash of contradictory positions based on an outdated analysis of the war.”

“It was written when the war was stalemated, released when Ukraine is winning,” said Cirincione, who resigned from the Quincy Institute over the think tank’s call for diplomatic talks. “Of course the positions don’t make sense.”

Within 24 hours, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., the caucus chair, withdrew the letter and issued a “clarification statement.” Other signatories acted like they were walking the letter back, though they were merely reiterating the unequivocal support for Ukraine’s defense that the letter itself had made clear. (Many of the lawmakers involved did not respond to my requests for comment.)

In a nearly 900-word statement, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., blamed “unfortunate timing” and doubled down on the idea that the U.S. should help Ukraine fight until the end. “All champions of democracy over autocracy — whether they call themselves progressives, conservatives or liberals — should be doing whatever we can to ensure that Ukraine wins this just war as quickly as possible,” he said.

A few voices of reason emerged, as a few members of Congress held fast. Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y, were among the few who publicly defended their call for diplomacy. “History shows that silencing debate in Congress about matters of war and peace never ends well,” Khanna said at the time.

Related

The Disturbing Groupthink Over the War in Ukraine

Even some former Obama officials were shocked by the response. Ben Rhodes criticized the “circular firing squad” against pro-diplomacy advocates on the left, saying there was “nothing objectionable in this letter whatsoever.”

Far from being an “outdated analysis,” as critics like Cirincione claimed, the letter’s strategy of using war successes to get a ceasefire seems today like it was far-sighted.

“Cycle of Persistent Violence”

Since the ill-fated letter, the war has ground on — with devastating results for the people of Ukraine. Ukraine is not in a position to win the war, nor does it have a stronger bargaining position in talks than it did in late 2022 when the CPC letter came out.

A New York Times report in August cited U.S. officials estimating the Ukrainian death toll at close to 70,000, with 100,000 to 120,000 wounded. Ukraine has lost a fifth of its population to migration, and many able-bodied men have been killed, severely injured, or are currently fighting and out of the workforce. CNN reported this week that desertion is a major problem for Ukraine.

Despite the heavy toll, Ukraine lost territory to Russia over the course of 2023, and Russian advances have only gained steam since then.

Former CIA Russia analyst George Beebe said that the conflict has become a war of attrition, so Ukrainians are losing bargaining leverage by the day. “They’re going to need Western help” to strike a compromise settlement with Russia, he said, adding that it would take robust U.S. involvement.

Has it benefited Ukraine to keep fighting? “No, I don’t think so,” Beebe told me. “Actually, Ukraine has lost a lot more people. It is on a path toward becoming a failed state.”

Despite the criticisms, despite many of its members caving, the CPC letter had been on to something. Now, Washington is playing catch-up, with Ukraine bearing the brunt of the lack of U.S. foresight and no one standing to gain as much as empowered Vladimir Putin.

Though the controversy around the CPC letter was almost immediately memory-holed, it would only be a few weeks before it started to look like pro-diplomacy advocates would eventually be vindicated.

A Washington Post report revealed that the Biden administration was privately encouraging Ukraine to show that it’s open to negotiations. Gen. Mark Milley, the since-retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the growing group of people advocating for diplomacy to end the war. Citing the lesson of World War I, where the failure to negotiate led to millions of unnecessary deaths, Milley called on Russia and Ukraine to “seize the moment” and consider peace talks that winter.

For all the purportedly pro-Ukraine motivations behind the meltdown over the ceasefire letter, it is Ukrainians themselves who have most acutely felt the pain of continued war.

Many Ukrainians seem to understand this better than backers in Washington: Ukraine’s government reportedly charged nearly 19,000 soldiers with abandoning their positions in just the first four months of 2024. The same could be said for conscripted Russians forced to serve under Putin’s authoritarian drive to win the war.

“There are no protections for conscientious objectors in Ukraine or in Russia through this war,” said Bridget Moix, the general secretary of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a progressive group that supports diplomacy. “We have to look at how we can support other ways to end this war, other ways to protect civilians, other ways to find a solution out of the violence now. We’re in a cycle of persistent violence that’s costing tremendous lives on both sides.”

Reduced Leverage

Though Ukrainian and American leaders have come to terms with Ukraine’s reduced negotiating leverage, Washington national security elites have not reckoned with the stances they took earlier in the war. After experiencing what former State Department official-turned-commentator Tommy Vietor called a “strangely vicious controversy,” former proponents of diplomacy are now steering clear of the topic.

Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., one of the CPC members who signed the initial 2022 letter, disavowed it in October of that year.

“Timing in diplomacy is everything. I signed this letter on June 30, but a lot has changed since then. I wouldn’t sign it today,” Jacobs wrote on X. “We have to continue supporting Ukraine economically and militarily to give them the leverage they need to end this war.”

Today, asked if Jacobs stands by her decision to withdraw support for the letter, her office replied, “Decisions about if and when to negotiate an end to this war are up to Ukraine. I have and will continue to support Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.”

For some experts, there was a missed opportunity to stand firm behind the letter.

“We always say that it’s for the Ukrainians to decide, but really we make Ukrainian decisions possible by our support.”

“That was the moment to just sort of say, ‘OK, let’s split the baby here, and you’re going to be able to get this, and we’re going to be able to walk away and not have our infrastructure destroyed,’” said Keith Darden, a comparative politics professor at American University and Russia–Ukraine expert. “If you think about the destruction that’s been visited on Ukraine, both just sheer death toll and in the destruction of the power grid and infrastructure since that time, the fall of 2022, it’s just really tragic that there wasn’t more of a push made then.”

The negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow in the early weeks of the Russian invasion — which were held predominantly in Turkey — were another chance to end the war, Darden said. In April 2022, Russia and Ukraine had agreed on the outlines of a tentative agreement to halt the conflict. The U.S. and U.K. governments, however, worked to sabotage the deal and prolong the war, according to multiple reports.

By May 2022, Ukrainska Pravda, a pro-Western Ukrainian outlet, reported that former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that the West would not support a peace deal even if Ukraine was ready to sign one. The West, Johnson said, preferred to fight Putin because he was less powerful than they thought.

“We always say that it’s for the Ukrainians to decide, but really we make Ukrainian decisions possible by our support,” Darden said. “Without our support, Ukrainians wouldn’t be in a position to make decisions — these things would be forced on them by Russian victory.”

The post Progressives Were Pilloried for Wanting to End the Ukraine War in 2022. Things Have Only Gotten Worse. appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

“As Commander in Chief,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention last week, “I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

Harris’s bellicose bluster received raucous applause from many in Chicago (although not from her stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff, or younger sister, Maya Harris) but struck some observers and pundits as especially “hawkish.” In reality, Harris is merely uniting two popular threads of Beltway boasting about the U.S. military.

Related

From Bush to Obama, and Trump to Biden, U.S. Militarism Is the Great Unifier

For the last two decades, successive presidents have competed to offer the most hyperbolic assessment of the U.S. military. For George W. Bush, the U.S. armed forces were “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” His successor Barack Obama declared them “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.” Donald Trump said America had the “greatest military in the world.” Joe Biden returned to Obama-era levels of praise, proclaiming them “the greatest fighting force the world has ever known.” (Just this week Harris repeated the exact line.)

The grandiosity of these claims is no doubt meant to paper over a dismal record: a bloody stalemate in Korea that still lacks a peace treaty, a devastating loss in Vietnam, a forever war in Iraq, a blowback-generator of a conflict in Libya, the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan, a dead end in Syria, an unending stalemate in Somalia, failures in the African Sahel, and on and on.

“Lethality,” on the other hand, is a term of art uncomplicated by military fiascos, deadlocks, and failures, which has made it into a favorite Pentagon buzzword. Nobody doubts that the United States can kill people. Dead civilians from Southeast Asia to the Middle East to the Horn of Africa attest to this brutal fact.

When the Pentagon talks about lethality, however, it’s often couched in bloodless (and often incomprehensible) language divorced from the reality of reeking corpses with lifeless eyes and shattered limbs.

In his 2022 National Defense Strategy, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin laid out five key traits of America’s “future force.” The first among them: “Lethal.” In Pentagon-speak, in that instance, “lethal” meant possessing “anti-access/area-denial-insensitive strike capabilities that can penetrate defense at range.”

In 2017, then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said his “Modernization Priorities for the United States Army” had “one simple focus: make Soldiers and units more lethal.” Milley wrote about not only “shooting” and “squad combat weapons,” but also things like “improving acquisition business processes.” Before he retired last year, as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Milley said the U.S. military needed to “maintain our current decisive advantage or lethality or readiness or competence by optimizing these technologies for the conduct of war.” The technologies in question were not, however, bombs or missiles but artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

Lethality is the ultimate Pentagon hobby horse, a shiny and fuzzily defined goal that can be ridden up the DoD ladder, and everybody in the military wants to get in on it.

In discussing the 2024 Pentagon budget request, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen H. Hicks said the funding would deliver “combat-credible joint forces that are the most lethal, resilient, survivable, agile and responsive in the world.” For the Army National Guard, lethality is wrapped up with retention rates. While medicine’s founding principle may be “first, do no harm,” Navy Medicine boasts that it “supports the force’s lethality by maintaining state-of-the-art medical and operational readiness.” For the Defense Logistics Agency, the magic recipe to “increase infantry squad lethality” is a battlefield-ready pepperoni pizza “with a high-heat-tolerant mozzarella cheese.”

As Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., highlighted in a criticism of Harris’s speech, the nebulous goal of lethality can also justify seemingly endless military spending.

“In all due respect, the United States is now spending more than the next 10 nations combined on defense,” said Sanders on ABC’s “This Week.” “We want the strongest defense in the world, but I do think enough is enough. You’re seeing military contractors profits soaring, and I think we can have the strongest defense in the world without spending a trillion dollars a year.”

If history is any guide, lethality in a Harris presidency won’t be limited to Pentagon personal pan pizzas with three-year shelf lives. Dead civilians in Libya, Somalia, Yemen, or some other far-off land will likely attest to the efficacy of the greatest fighting force the world has ever known.

The Intercept reached out to the Harris campaign for comment on Sanders’s critique, what lethality means to the newly minted Democratic nominee and just how the “most lethal fighting force in the world” would be employed if she were president. The Intercept did not hear back prior to publication.

The post What Kamala Harris Meant by “Most Lethal Fighting Force” in Her DNC Speech appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Last week, an investigation by The Intercept revealed that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has repeatedly stiffed the Defense Department on a bill for support of a Saudi-led war in Yemen that killed hundreds of thousands of people and sparked a humanitarian catastrophe. For months — up to and since publication — the Pentagon has ducked The Intercept’s requests for comment on the unpaid bill.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., in a statement to The Intercept, excoriated the kingdom, its leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and the Pentagon in response to the findings.

“Yemen’s children will grow up knowing Saudi Arabia’s brutal war that caused so much slaughter and starvation was made possible with American support. Now, the billionaire crown prince apparently will not reimburse America’s taxpayers for refueling his warplanes,” Paul told The Intercept. “Saudi Arabia’s delinquency, and our government’s arrogant lack of transparency, further demonstrates that America’s servility to this autocratic regime is a national disgrace.”

The senator has been a longtime critic of U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia due to the kingdom’s dismal record on human rights. In 2019, Paul joined with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and a bipartisan group of lawmakers imploring President Donald Trump to end U.S. support of the Saudi war in Yemen. Late last year, Paul also attempted to block the sale of sophisticated intelligence and military communications technologies to Saudi Arabia.

Despite the unpaid debt of $15 million — the remaining balance of a $300 million bill for aerial refueling missions which the Pentagon has repeatedly attempted to collect — the Biden administration recently lifted its ban on selling offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia, authorizing an initial shipment of air-to-ground munitions to the kingdom. The restriction did not apply to sales of so-called defensive arms and military services. Those sales have amounted to almost $10 billion over the past four years.

The Biden administration’s embrace of Saudi Arabia comes as new questions have been raised concerning the kingdom’s role in the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people on 9/11.

In 2021, the Biden administration imposed the offensive weapons ban due to the war in Yemen which directly or indirectly killed at least 377,000 people, including thousands of civilians slain in Saudi-coalition airstrikes. Despite a deescalation in the conflict following a 2022 truce, 18.2 million people, more than half of Yemen’s population, still require humanitarian assistance.

A 2022 Government Accountability Office report noted that between March 2015 and August 2021, the United Nations estimated that coalition airstrikes in Yemen killed or injured more than 18,000 civilians. The GAO also determined that the Pentagon and the State Department failed to investigate the role of U.S.-provided military support in causing these casualties.

Related

The U.S. Fueled Saudi Jets Bombing Yemen. Now the Saudis Won’t Pay Their Gas Bill.

When the administration announced, earlier this month, that it was dropping its ban on sales of offensive arms to Saudi Arabia and authorizing an initial shipment of air-to-ground munitions, it also said it would consider additional new transfers on a “case-by-case basis,” according to senior administration officials. 

For months, The Intercept has contacted the Pentagon to ascertain if Saudi Arabia has paid any additional portion of its remaining aerial refueling bill. Return receipts show that the questions were read three times by Pentagon officials in April and May. Despite dozens of follow-up messages in recent months, the Defense Department has never responded to The Intercept’s questions.

On August 10, the State Department acknowledged receipt of The Intercept’s questions about the reasons for the resumption of weapons transfers to Saudi Arabia but did not reply to repeated follow-ups. A message sent to Saudi Arabia’s embassy in Washington, D.C., seeking an interview also received no response.

The post Senator Calls U.S. Support for Saudis a “National Disgrace” After Intercept Reveals Unpaid Debt to Pentagon appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

When President Barack Obama wanted to bomb Syria in 2013 following reports that Bashar al-Assad was using chemical weapons on his own people, Rep. Tim Walz, D-Minn., who represented a rural district in southern Minnesota, went to a local grocery store.

Walz stood outside the store and asked everybody that came out whether they supported bombing Syria. Every single person said no.

“He was clearly stunned because he told us that story the next time we talked to him,” said Cathy Murphy, president of the Minnesota Peace Project, which has lobbied Walz on a range of foreign policy issues over the years. “It’s like, ‘The people in my area, they do not want more war.’ And that really impacted the way he voted.”

During his time in Congress, Walz, now at the top of the Democratic ticket as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, was a vocal advocate against a new war in Syria and evolved into a strong defender of congressional war powers. He ran for the House in 2006 on an anti-Iraq war platform, was active in multiple efforts to prevent the U.S. from waging a new war in Syria, and co-sponsored every war powers resolution aimed at imposing congressional authority on the U.S. role in the war on Yemen, among other pieces of legislation related to American intervention abroad.

Walz and Harris constitute the first presidential ticket in U.S. history to be unified in support of key legal interpretations that have significant implications for war powers. Since the debacle of the Iraq War, Democrats have staked out stronger positions against the Bush administration’s notion of unchecked presidential powers to make war. As Obama took power, however, the administration undertook a program of more limited adventurism but never renounced the claims of expansive powers it inherited through Bush administration precedents.

Walz and Harris, on the other hand, took on-the-record stances in favor of using legislation to limit those powers.

They were both early supporters of the Yemen War Powers Resolution, which directed the president to remove U.S. troops from hostilities “in or affecting” Yemen. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 was passed to reassert Congress’s constitutional role in deciding whether to go to war. Under the Vietnam-era law, the president can’t send troops overseas into hostilities unless it has been authorized by Congress.

The 2019 Yemen war powers resolution went on to become the first since the advent of the law to pass both chambers of Congress. (Harris also voted for an Iran war powers resolution following President Donald Trump’s assassination of a top Iranian military commander.)

In addition to opposing various interventions, Walz has, for his part, also supported efforts to revoke and reissue more restrained versions of the 2001 and 2002 authorizations for the use of military force, or AUMFs, that formed a shaky legal foundation for a worldwide “war on terror.”

Today, with Israel’s war in Gaza leading to U.S bombings of Yemen, advocates for humanitarian relief say having a presidential ticket recognize the limits of war-making powers is as important as ever.

“They need to show us, the public, that they support these issues because that’s their principle, that they do believe in the value of the War Powers Resolution,” said Dr. Aisha Jumaan, president of the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation, “and that we need to have oversight of wars, especially now given the risk of escalation In the Middle East.”

Following Anti-War Constituents

Walz opposed war in Syria during both major pushes for a robust U.S. role in the conflict: the 2013 effort when Obama was seeking authorization, and in 2016 when hawks were pushing for more involvement.

In 2016, Walz helped lead a group of House Democrats that urged Obama, successfully, to resist the mounting pressure. After more than 50 State Department officials came out urging Obama to carry out strikes on Syria, Walz — who served 24 years in the Army National Guard and retired in 2005 — led a letter with fellow veterans Reps. John Conyers, D-Mich., and Seth Moulton, D-Mass., calling on the president to keep pursuing diplomatic negotiations.

During the national conversation about intervening in 2013, he was also one of 18 Democrats to sign on to a Republican-led letter to Obama, written by Rep. Scott Rigell, R-Va., saying that striking Syria without congressional approval would be unconstitutional.

“We have to challenge the administration,” Walz said in 2013. “If we’re being true to who we are, it is about the constitutional responsibility of the House and it should not matter who is the occupant of the White House.”

Walz told the Star Tribune that he was representing the anti-war views of his constituents, which were unanimous. “After 12 years of war, the American public has every right to weigh in and expect that their views be represented in Congress,” Walz said. 

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Like most Democrats, Walz did side with the Obama administration in voting against an abrupt end to the Libya intervention in 2011. After the civil war in Libya became mired in disaster — with even Obama agreeing that the U.S. intervention was the “worst mistake” of his presidency — Walz’s trajectory became clear. He emerged as a defender of congressional war powers. He went on to support legislation aiming to block an attack on North Korea without congressional authorization when President Donald Trump was threatening “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

In 2017, Walz co-sponsored a bill that would have repealed the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs and replaced them with a narrower authorization with a three-year sunset. The 2001 AUMF, which was passed after the September 11 attacks and has served as the legal basis of the U.S. war on terror, was intended to authorize war against the orchestrators of the attack. The decades-old authorization, however, has been stretched to wage war in at least a dozen countries without additional authority from Congress.

A senior Democratic aide who has been involved in recent efforts to rein in presidential war powers said Walz and Harris have taken a “pretty strong and consistent position” on Congress having the sole authority over the offensive use of force. “This is a breath of fresh air,” said the aide, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press. “If they remain consistent with their voting records and if they respond to popular engagement on this, it could promise a much more peaceful and constitutionally sound foreign policy.”

Murphy, of the Minnesota Peace Project, said Walz was receptive to her group’s views and willing to change his position if he realized he was wrong. “I don’t think Tim Walz would have supported that but over time he basically said, ‘I want to repeal the AUMF,’” she recalled. “He supported repealing it simply because he could see this thing was being used in ways it was not supposed to be used. He really understood the constitutional requirement that Congress declares war, that Congress controls whether or not the president can just willy-nilly go into somewhere.”

War Powers Resolutions

Section 8(c) of the War Powers Resolution defines the introduction of armed forces into hostilities to include “the assignment of members of such armed forces to command, coordinate, participate in the movement of or accompany” the military forces of any foreign country when those military forces are engaged in hostilities or potentially engaged in hostilities.

A Senate report on the War Powers Resolution explained how the language was intended to “prevent secret, unauthorized military support activities and to prevent a repetition of many of the most controversial and regrettable actions in Indochina” — an engagement that started with “advisors” on the ground and bloomed into the full-on catastrophe of the Vietnam War and its attendant secret campaigns.

The Yemen war powers resolutions co-sponsored by both Harris and Walz harnessed this broader legal interpretation of the term “hostilities” — expansive enough to include the crucial support the U.S. was providing to the Saudi-led coalition bombing Yemen.

Though the Obama and Trump administrations argued that the U.S. was not participating in hostilities against Ansar Allah, the rebel group known as the Houthis, the U.S. role was still vital to the brutal campaign — the worst humanitarian crisis in the world before Gaza.

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At the time, the U.S. was providing ongoing maintenance and spare parts for bomber jets, intelligence for strikes, and mid-air refueling — a service Saudi Arabia has been delinquent in paying for. Its support role included U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, both in the “joint coordination planning cell” and on Saudi air bases. Walz and Harris didn’t hesitate to say that these activities constituted unauthorized “hostilities” under U.S. law.

The perspective on “hostilities” in the war powers resolutions is especially salient today. The Obama era saw a transition away from George W. Bush-style invasions, into a worldwide secret drone program. Eventually, U.S. military adventurism took the shape of proxy wars: With the war in Ukraine, Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, and the U.S. ramping up its militarization of the South China Sea and Taiwan, using proxies became a more convenient and inconspicuous way to wage wars that Americans would never support.

Walz and Harris aren’t destined to maintain the same positions on presidential war-making powers if they take the White House. The dynamics and entrenched power of long-serving bureaucrats in the executive branch could change the calculus and influence their approach.

Their records, however, provide a reason for advocates of restraint to be hopeful, as well as a basis for holding them accountable if they stray from their previous stances. Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Chris Coons, D-Del., also supporters of the Yemen war powers resolution, have been floated as options for secretary of state.

“As legislators, both Harris and Walz have explicitly supported Congress’s original intent of the War Powers Resolution, but we will work to ensure whoever occupies the White House acts according to the Constitution and the law,” said Cavan Kharrazian, a foreign policy adviser at Demand Progress, a left-leaning group that helped lead the coalition that passed the Yemen war powers resolution.

In contrast, Biden, as the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as the Democratic staff director of the committee, suppressed dissident views related to war powers and worked to give the Bush administration broad power to go to war with Iraq.

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During an appearance before a military review board, an attorney for Guantánamo Bay’s “forever prisoner” revealed that negotiations are underway for his possible release after being tortured and detained without charges for 22 years.

Abu Zubaydah (whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Husayn) is perhaps the most egregious victim of the U.S. national security apparatus that ran amok after the September 11 attacks and still grinds on. He appeared in a Guantánamo courtroom Thursday, listening to his attorney Solomon Shinerock tell a board of U.S. officials that a “redacted” country could admit Abu Zubaydah and monitor his activities indefinitely. The detainee will agree to any form of surveillance by the host country, said Shinerock, who did not name the country during the unclassified portion of the hearing.

The prisoner, looking healthy at age 52 in a business suit and tinted glasses, did not sport the piratical eye patch he carried the first time he was seen in a public setting in 2016. At that time, the government was still insisting that Abu Zubaydah had been an important Al Qaeda operative who had advance knowledge of 9/11 and other attacks and was only cooperating with Guantánamo staff as a subterfuge. Since then, the claim that he was “No. 3” in Al Qaeda has been abandoned. The U.S. government’s assessment of Abu Zubaydah has shrunk to a brief statement that he “probably” served as one of Osama bin Laden’s “most trusted” facilitators.

Unlike Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three other alleged 9/11 plotters, Abu Zubaydah has never been charged with any crime. The U.S. assessment notes that he never swore allegiance to bin Laden because the Saudi militant leader focused on attacking the United States while Abu Zubaydah “had wanted to attack Israel for its treatment of Palestinians.”

Abu Zubaydah has the funds to support himself upon release, Shinerock told the panel. The detainee was awarded more than $200,000 by the European Court of Human Rights in 2022 as compensation for CIA torture at black sites located in Lithuania and Poland. In 2023, a United Nations human rights panel, U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, urged the United States to immediately release Abu Zubaydah.

“Bin Laden is dead,” Shinerock said, insisting his client “has no radical or violent tendencies.” He said Abu Zubaydah now believes that “violence is not answer to the problems of the oppressed.”

The fact that Abu Zubaydah is a stateless Palestinian makes his case more complicated. He comes from a Palestinian Bedouin family whose village near Jericho was seized by Israeli settlers in 1948. His grandparents wound up in Gaza, where Abu Zubaydah’s father was born.

According to Cathy Scott-Clark, who communicated with Abu Zubaydah and his family for her book “The Forever Prisoner,” his father could not return to Gaza after the 1967 war, but the family visited his grandparents living in a house in Gaza near the beach.

Abu Zubaydah was born in Saudi Arabia in 1971. Of the five Palestinians detained by the U.S. at Guantánamo, he was the only one designated as being from Gaza. The other Palestinian detainees have been released to Hungary, Germany, and Spain.

Abu Zubaydah was captured by U.S. agents after a gun battle in a so-called Al Qaeda guesthouse in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002. Over the course of four years, he was held prisoner at CIA black sites in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland, Lithuania, and Morocco, before being sent to Guantánamo in 2006. He was the first detainee to be waterboarded, and he endured that “enhanced interrogation technique” 83 times.

The 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on the U.S. torture program stated, “After taking custody of Abu Zubaydah, CIA officers concluded that he ‘should remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life,’” which “may preclude [Abu Zubaydah] from being turned over to another country.”

The Department of Defense’s Periodic Review Secretariat — comprised of officials from across the federal government — reviews “whether continued detention of particular individuals held at Guantanamo remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”

Since 2016 — the first time Abu Zubaydah appeared in public after his capture — the board has reviewed his file or held a hearing to review with him present, nine times. After every review, the board has found that “his continued detention is warranted,” and “remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”

It took two years for a final determination to be made after Abu Zubaydah’s last full review hearing in June 2021. Now he awaits a determination on Thursday’s full review and the outcome of ongoing negotiations with an unknown country on his resettlement. If he ever was a threat to U.S. security, has that threat finally subsided?

The post Negotiations Are Underway for Guantánamo’s “Forever Prisoner” From Gaza to Be Released appeared first on The Intercept.

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Worried about a potential war with China, the Pentagon is turning to a new class of weapons to fight the numerically superior People’s Liberation Army: drones, lots and lots of drones.

In August 2023, the Defense Department unveiled Replicator, its initiative to field thousands of “all-domain, attritable autonomous (ADA2) systems”: Pentagon-speak for low-cost (and potentially AI-driven) machines — in the form of self-piloting ships, large robot aircraft, and swarms of smaller kamikaze drones — that they can use and lose en masse to overwhelm Chinese forces.

Earlier this month, two Pentagon offices leading this charge announced that four nontraditional weapons makers had been chosen for another drone program, with test flights planned for later this year. The companies building this “Enterprise Test Vehicle,” or ETV, will have to prove that their drone can fly over 500 miles and deliver a “kinetic payload,” with a focus on weapons that are low-cost, quick to build, and modular, according to a 2023 solicitation for proposals and a recent announcement from the Air Force Armament Directorate and the Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon’s off-the-shelf acceleration arm. Many analysts believe that the ETV initiative may be connected to the Replicator program. DIU did not return a request for clarification prior to publication.

The new robot planes will mark a shift from the Defense Department’s “legacy” drones which DIU says are “over-engineered” and “labor-intensive” to produce. The four contractors chosen for the program are Anduril Industries, Integrated Solutions for Systems, Leidos Dynetics, and Zone 5 Technologies, which were selected from a field of more than 100 applicants.

The goal is to choose one or more variants of what look to be suicide drones (weapon-makers prefer “loitering munitions”) that can be mass produced through “on-call” manufacturing and churned out in quantity as needed. (DIU did not offer clarification on whether all prototypes are expected to be strictly kamikaze aircraft.) These drones will likely be smaller than the MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper drones — which were used extensively as ground-launched, reusable, missile-firing assassination weapons during the first decades of the war on terror — and more versatile, since the new ETVs must include an air-delivered variant that can be dropped or launched from cargo aircraft.

For the last 25 years, uncrewed Predators and Reapers, piloted by military personnel on the ground, have been killing civilians across the planet, from Afghanistan and Libya to Syria and Yemen.

To highlight just one instance, a 2018 U.S. drone strike in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians — including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse — as revealed by a 2023 investigation by The Intercept, prompting two dozen human rights organizations and five members of Congress to call for the Pentagon to compensate Luul and Mariam’s family for the deaths. 

Experts worry that mass production of new low-cost, deadly drones will lead to even more civilian casualties. “The clear danger is that these drones will be used at a greater scale, raising questions about the possibility of civilian harm,” Priyanka Motaparthy, the director of the Project on Counterterrorism, Armed Conflict and Human Rights at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute, told The Intercept. “We need to know if these drones might be used in situations that put civilians at risk. We need to know how risks will be assessed.”

While U.S. drones have relied on human operators to conduct lethal strikes — many times with disastrous results — advances in artificial intelligence have increasingly raised the possibility of robot planes, in various nations’ arsenals, selecting their own targets. 

Electronic jamming by Russia in the Ukraine war has spurred a shift to autonomous drones that lock on a target and continue their mission even when communications with a human operator have been severed. Last year, the Ukrainian drone company Saker claimed its fully autonomous Saker Scout was using AI to identify and attack 64 different types of Russian “military objects.”

Ukraine has employed as many as 10,000 low-cost drones per month to counter the Russian military’s advantage in forces. Pentagon officials see Ukraine’s drone force as a model for countering the larger military of the People’s Republic of China. “Replicator is meant to help us overcome the PRC’s biggest advantage, which is mass,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, one of the officials overseeing that program.

Last month, the Pentagon announced it would “accelerate fielding of the Switchblade-600 loitering munition” — a kamikaze anti-armor drone from contractor AeroVironment that flies overhead until it finds a target — that has been used extensively in Ukraine. “This is a critical step in delivering the capabilities we need, at the scale and speed we need,” said Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of Indo-Pacific Command, or INDOPACOM.

At a recent NATO conference, Alex Bornyakov, Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation, discussed the potential for using AI and a network of acoustic sensors to target a Russian “war criminal” for assassination by autonomous drone. “Computer vision works,” he said. “It’s already proven.”

The use of autonomous weapons has been subject to debate for over a decade. Since 2013, the Stop Killer Robots campaign, which has grown to a coalition of more than 250 nongovernmental organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, has called for a legally binding treaty banning autonomous weapons. 

Pentagon regulations released last year state that fully- and semi-autonomous weapons systems must be used “in accordance with the law of war” and “DoD AI Ethical Principles.” The latter, released in 2020, only stipulate, however, that personnel will exercise “appropriate” levels of “judgment and care” when it comes to developing and deploying AI.

But “care” has never been an American hallmark. For the last century, the U.S. military has conducted airstrikes demonstrating a consistent disregard for civilians: casting or misidentifying ordinary people as enemies; failing to investigate civilian harm allegations; excusing casualties as regrettable but unavoidable; and failing to prevent their recurrence or to hold troops accountable.

During the first 20 years of the war on terror, the U.S. conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes across seven major conflict zones — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen — and killed up to 48,308 civilians, according to a 2021 analysis by Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group.

The Defense Department repeatedly misses its deadline for reporting the number of civilians that U.S. operations kill each year, the lowest bar for accountability for its actions. Its 2022 report was issued this April, a year late. The Pentagon blew its congressionally mandated deadline for the 2023 report on May 1 of this year. Last month, The Intercept asked Lisa Lawrence, the Pentagon spokesperson who handles civilian harm issues, why the 2023 report was late and when to expect it. A return receipt indicates that she read the email, but she failed to offer an answer.

At least one of the new drone prototypes will go into full production for the military, based on how Special Operations Command, INDOPACOM, and others evaluate their performance. The winner, or winners, of the competition will be chosen to “continue development toward a production variant capable of rapidly scalable manufacture,” according to DIU.

A drone scale-up in the absence of accountability worries Columbia Law’s Motaparthy. “The Pentagon has yet to come up with a reliable way to account for past civilian harm caused by U.S. military operations,” she said. “So the question becomes, ‘With the potential rapid increase in the use of drones, what safeguards potentially fall by the wayside? How can they possibly hope to reckon with future civilian harm when the scale becomes so much larger?’”

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